Ex-Team Ninja Boss Has A New Studio With A New Name

Dead or Alive developer Tomonobu Itagaki left Tecmo over unpaid wages and started up a new studio. It was originally thought to be called “Tokyo Vikings”. It’s not.

The new studio is called “Valhalla” as in Norse mythology. Valhalla is an enormous hall with over five hundred doors and outfitted with spears in the rafters. It is known as the Hall of the Slain because it is where half of the heroes who have died on the battlefield are brought.

Currently, the Valhalla studio staff is about 50 strong, and there are plans to increase that number slightly. What is Vahalla working on?

“I won’t say where we are right now,” Itagaki told game mag Famitsu. “But it will be something that people have never seen before.” Tomonobu Itagaki is the studio’s Chief Technical Officer.

“Valhalla” is a much better name than “Tokyo Vikings”, which sounds like a sports team of some sorts. It’s such a good name that there is already an Australia-based game development company called Valhalla Studios. The game was established in 2007, well before Itagaki’s Valhalla outfit, and specializes in Xbox 360 and PC games.

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